I should say right off that I distrust "global political revolutions" on the whole -- the revolutionaries in them are often willing to cut corners on violence and too often develop narratives excusing and overlooking bad things.

And I don't think transnational, wired elite networks, even with a lot of my friends and colleagues in them, are a way the world can be run justly. I'm not for replacing states with NGO panels. Carne Ross is understandably loathing states after having to be up close and personal with them particularly for years at the UN and now he wants basically to have them disappear and establish a new world order. I'm coming at this from a different angle having been with NGOs for 30 years, and I think he just has no idea how awful it's going to get having a few non-state actors run the whole world on Facebook.

I think people like Carne Ross would benefit from studying the largest online experiment in democracy in the history of the world -- Second Life -- with 1.5 million people logging on regularly from all over the world, and deliberating in many different kinds of ways, and most of all voting (at least until about 2-3 weeks from now when the developers remove this salient feature from a world that has had it for 7 years). I don't know if he has never even had to have any lengthy exposure to the IRC channels and other big real-time discussions online and he may not have any idea.

For those who dismiss Second Life as somehow a "game" or some losers' sex paradise or the place all the big companies left, well, you're missing out on an extraordinary online social experiment that you'd have to spend millions coding yourself -- and it's all right here to be used for free, even.

The issues debated and voted on aren't trivial; they're the very stuff of the Internet. For example, right now, 1,531 voted on a feature to block an inworld device that was exposing privacy -- the sort of thing that riles Facebook users daily, sometimes en masse, and sometimes reaches the mainstream press as a burning issue. Here, people are *inside the software* and are trying to get the devs to *patch it to do something about it*.

This prolonged and heated battle over a feature I proposed, Web-382 -- only had 20 votes, but many more comments, and ultimately was implemented -- only to be defeated in other ways. It was an important exposition of the problem that plagues every online democracy with coded tools: the problem of some people closing other people's proposals as being too weak, too off-topic, too repetitive, too undoable, etc. etc. I fought for the right for anyone -- anyone, not just special committees or the develoeprs -- to open a proposal and attract votes and not have it closed. It's not as if it clutters the view -- this is an interface where you only find what you are looking for by searching for a type of feature, date, key word, author name, etc.

Make no mistake about it: the Lindens are removing voting for reasons that don't just have to do with their claim that "they don't heed it"; it's part of a definitely ideological trend among technologists and one that is antithetical to democracy, in fact. There is a growing fad now based on various philosophies, such as "deliberative democracy" which is basically -- in my book -- what we used to call "democratic centralism" in the Politburo. It involves deliberations by a defined group of experts who review issues with rationality and alleged good will and arrive at "the right" decision collaboratively, without "needing" to vote. This is a very compressed rendition of a complex set of ideas with different schools and debates and such, but basically, it's no accident that geeks reach for taking out the "no" vote: this isn't just a technical platformist problem of "gaming the system" or "negativity"; a straight up and down vote is ultimately about power, and power is not what platformists wish to cede. Forcing "deliberative democracy" as a faddish new method on people; forcing "direct democracy" and scorning representative democracy; these are all part and parcel of a quest for power, above all.

There are at least seven deadly flaws in any online democracy scheme (and probably more), and they are, in brief:

1. Problems of verification of identity, the use of alts and sock puppets; and now "persona management," the manipulation of online voices through the use of bots or software programs

2. Problems of lack of ethics due to the hacker culture of the developers of any coded system and any artifact or facet of online life made by software in which the user has no say

3. Problems of technical exigencies -- it can be difficult to display and manipulate data; it can be hard to merge proposals reasonably; it can be hard to search for relevant issues, etc.

4. The politics of who gets to frame the issues online. The geeks themselves coding the system? A self-selected group of "good citizens"? Anybody?

5. The politics of who gets to moderate speech, how it is moderated, whether there is free speech, whether the concept of the "troll" or the "flame-bait" is wielded by one group to maintain power over another; issues of due process

6. The problem of no "no" vote. Usually in online deliberative democracy and similar ideologically-driven exercises, the proposal to remove the "no" vote is made on grounds that allowing "no" can be "gamed" maliciously; or that it can be "too negative" etc. That this doesn't obtain in a real-life organic situation such as a proposition in California about whether you are for or against gay marriage seldom perturbs the proponents of the "no no vote".

7. The problem of "housekeepers" -- the greatest challenge of any democracy isn't just protecting the people (the users) from the state (the coders), it's protecting people from each other (minorities from majorities) --there are always people who want to close others' proposals as "undoable"; people who declare certain ones "duplications"; the "tyranny of who shows up" (the regulars who "have no lives" do everything); the problem of retiring proposals with too few votes, of "voting comments up and down," etc.

In following these "7 deadly flaws," you have three main battles at first in establishing the system:

Coder Ethics

The first battle of any deliberative democracy experiment *should* be (but rarely is) about the coders and their ethics. How honest will they be in setting up the system? Do the users participate in decisions about the code with them on an equal basis or are they dismissed as "technologically incompetent"? Do the coders insist on handling everything and then disempower the user? Do they bleed their own ideologies into the tools (copyleftism, collectivism)? Are they accountable? Do they make decisions without notification or involvement of the user base? Unfortunately, the ethics and morals and culture of the coders are the last thing people in an online democracy ever think of; they take it for granted until it is too late.

Watch Out for No No Vote

The second battle is over the "no no vote" situation. You will be surprised how many times people who seem to be "for democracy" and "democratic" suddenly began to demand that the "no" be removed. Watch for it. If you cannot keep the "no," that's the first sime that you are already in a disempowered situation. You should not be frog-marched into accepting the "no no" by tales of how "positive, progressive proposals" should be put rather than evoking a "negative".

All that happens when you remove the normal organic "no" from any human system through such social engineering is that it merely shows up elsewhere. People make proposals that are in fact the "no" to other proposals, put in positive version.

What is the Constituency?

The third battle to be fought is over the power source; the source of legitimacy for the entire exercise. In real life, there were elements like "committees of correspondence" and "the constituent assembly" and the drafting of the Constitution before the vote -- and that's no accident, it's because you do need to establish what the community is, its common goals, its rules of the road, before you begin debates and votes.

Nowadays its fashionable to say the Constitutional framers are now disqualified because they were white property owners and even slave-owners. I reject that as multicultural Marxist claptrap. I see entire college text books and recommended reading lists in college these days with this discredited notion. That this bunch of white guys still made a system that produce the vote for women, the end of slavery and and civil rights for minorities, somehow escapes them. They found this model working too slow? Did they want to try the model over in China, Russia, India, Brazil, whatever then? Please.

It also shows a shocking lack of appreciation of how the Supreme Court defines the Constitution in rulings that become the law of the land and how important that is in defining the modern issues and updating the system. The notion that the Constitution is "like" Orville Wright's airplane that we would want to update to be sure to have the latest model (the analogy used by one professor) is just silly: the Supreme Court *is* the updating model.

And you have to drill down with this -- what exactly do these Marxist professor types really mean by saying that there had to be women, blacks, Native Americans, etc. in the constitutional drafting club? Do they mean that their presence would bring some special insights, some *different* way of doing things, some *better* way? Not really. Are they saying that these groups represent monolithic thinking in each case? All women, all Native Americans, all blacks are each perfectly uniform political groups? See, that's their implied notion. And that's really silly.

You want diversity? Even minorities that you brought to have diversity are more diverse than you seem willing to admit, professors. In fact, usually what I find in these debates that what this is about is to have "the people of colour" and "the disenfranchised" stand in to launch the Trojan Horse to dismantle capitalism, representative democracy, etc. and replace it with a revolutionary People's Commissariat. Usually the utopian complaining about the actualities of the framers imagine they could get something completely different than the messy democracy they have now with its liberal capitalism and unequal results -- they imagine if they could have a multicultural scene like the Soviet movie Circus (multiculturalism comes from the Soviet ideological campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s), everything would be fine. Everything would be different *the way they want to make it, with this sort of instrumentality*.

So complaints about this sort of "lack of diversity" is usually a stalking horse for "lack of a majoritarianism that would insert my point of view". I always watch for this in everything from a Personal Democracy Forum on up. Why the crying and wringing of hands by the Deanna Zandt's of the world (educated in German radicalism) that there are too many white people in the audience, or too many men? If we brought her Clarence Thomas, the black conservative Supreme Court justice, would that fix it for her? Of course not. If we brought her Pamela Geller, the conservative blogger who obsesses about Islam, would that fix the female problem? Of course not. Because it was never about real gender or real race representation, but the exploitation of these groups as icons of a "progressive" movement that will bring justice to us all -- if only they get the meeting packed lol.

The constituency of these onling things is never clear. It's whoever shows up. Or an invited group that lets in outsiders only in dribs or drabs "in the beta". Or whatever it is. But somewhere there's somebody who is going to insist on "civility" or who will demand moderation or demand exclusion -- and the question is to determine whether a) this person or group is legitimate b) they are honest brokers for conflict and disputes c) they will not eject people who disagree with them on specious grounds of being "trolls", etc.

There's a lot here. It really is not simple. People who think they are in a likeminded group may find they aren't when they disagree on these modalities.

How to Protect Dissent and Minorities and Adjudicate Disputes?

But where the pain really starts is when people who do not agree, who come from wildly different backgrounds, levels of education, value systems, etc. have to share this set of very inadequate tools -- and they will always be inadequate because *they are not organic, they are coded in a binary black/white system*.

The problems really start to ensue when there is no way to protect minorities or dissenters because there is a "forking" view common to open-source culture -- one strong dictator and his minions decide the course for the group, and others are told "there's the door". Or worse, in the name of accommodating dissent, endless deliberations are held to get "consensus," which is merely a means of wearing down dissenters. Because of the ideological refusal to have up and down yes/no votes, the group stalls endlessly. The way in which dissent and disagreement will be adjudicated really matters. Occupy Wall Street might still be in Zucotti park if the majority had been able to rein in the minority who refused to stick to the group's community agreement not to have drumming after 11 pm and if they had been able to stop urinating in the street, drug use, and even sexual assault by ejecting the people who engaged in those disruptive activities.

Where Will the Experiment Take Place?

It would be great if Carne Ross could intuitively realize that the place for his deliberative experiment is Second Life -- for a lot of reasons. But likely due to the snickering or disparagement of his peers, he'll be convinced that a Facebook or some other still-to-be-cooded Online Deliberator will be invented -- somebody's Moodle or Muddle -- and he'll use that. And it will have no no vote.

I can't help thinking of that 8,000 person online "massively multi student online course" or whatever it was called with the goofy Connectivists who used various gadgets to try to sift opinion ostensibly in "deliberation," but it was really the two instructors, a close set of their very closely-knit ideological friends and a smaller outer ring of fanboyz that set everything. You have to watch this sort of filtering because filtering under the guise of housekeeping and tidying up is often very political, and gets away with not being so. Remember: Stalin took the minutes in the Politburo. Look at how that turned out.

Below is my response to Carne's blog -- with lots and lots of detail -- which didn't clear the mod queue. Likely it was too long for the template.

02/25/2011

I could also title this blog, "Why Silicon Valley Culture is a Lot like Butt-Fucking".

Let me explain.

About 40 years ago, there was a fad that spread in our highschool in upstate New York. It involved wearing painters' pants or work shirts and workmen's jeans and duck-hunting jackets.

This fad started with the hippies and the artists in the high school, the kids that lounged around Art Hall or Band Hall (that would be me). A few kids who had moved upstate from New York City or New Jersey urban centers near NYC possibly started, or maybe somebody who had an older brother in college or something.

A few kids started wearing work shirts (I had seen camp counselors wearing those blue cotton shirts even 10 years earlier) and then work pants and painters' pants. These pants had lots of pockets, including on the sides of the leg, and hooks that you'd use to put a hammer or a paint brush in. The painter's pants were white, with big loop hooks on the sides and one on the back.

We'd buy these items at a little store owned by a Jewish couple on the Main Street of the town -- the kind of Jewish retailer struggling in this largely Christian town whose antisemitism was still rampant. The big mall was being built and was making serious inroads in their business, which ran to things like suits and dresses for proms or First Communion or workmen's clothes for the people who worked at CanCo, or American Can Company, a big factory on the wrong side of the tracks whose workers lived in poor tenements -- it has since gone out of business and closed, although it was left abandoned for a time.

The little store with the bell that jingled when the door opened was overwhelmed some days after school as a whole bunch of us piled in to buy work clothes. At first I think the owner was annoyed, especially at the idea of girls buying big ugly stiff denim work pants, but then I guess he figured it was an infusion for his business, so he encouraged the sales.

Soon everybody in the hippie/art/literary sort of scene, such as it was in that upstate high school, was wearing these outfits -- then the fad spread to the jocks and the cheerleaders and then only very belatedly to the AV Club, the nerds who wore polyester pants belted high, sometimes leaving a gap between the cuff and their shoe through which their white cotton socks were visible -- we called their pants "floods," as if they were going to wade in a flood.

When the little store in our town would be crowded or sold out, we'd go downtown to Midtown Mall, one of the country's first indoor malls, also since closed, and trawl around for stores that might have these pants -- but usually they didn't, so we went to a big warehouse outlet store that had Levis and these workclothes for cheap.

In time, over the years, as I sometimes talked about this phenomenon, at some point a roomie I had who was gay, or some gay friend explained to me that this fad came from gay culture. That it started on Christopher Street. That you could still see it even in the late 1970s if you went to the Meat District and beyond where gay motorcycles and toughs hung out, sometimes dressed in those kind of clothes. Apparently the handles and loops were helpful for grasping and having anal sex. The little loop on the back of the painters' pants was especially fun to yank down. These notions could have been apocryphal and not true, but that the fad first started among gay men was indisputable, as they will tell you themselves. It spread to clubs and bars and college campuses; from there, it spread to little upstate New York high schools. The way culture spreads.

An additional feature of this pants culture was that you could tie a bandanda on to the loop, and the colour and type of bandana would signal which kind of sex you were available for.

You had to laugh picturing that burly jock who was captain of the football team dressed in white painter's pants with loops, who had absolutely no clue that he was wearing clothes favoured by the gays on the docks originally.

That was all about consensual gay sex -- but another fad spread in the 2000s (or even earlier) that had to do with non-consensual sex. And that is the "pants on the ground" phenomenon, the low-slung pants practically falling off, that black teenagers and young men favoured, with their boxers hanging out, that literally seemed about to fall of their asses. This fad of course is very widespread now in all the highschools and colleges, although it's peaked a bit -- but you still see it. It had a kind of junior version as well -- 8 and 10 year old boys adopted extremely baggy shorts -- shorts that were almost like pants -- about mid-calf length -- that were low-slung but not falling off. The Pokemon trading set in the late 1990s and early 2000s favoured these baggy shorts.

But where did this culture get its start?

Well, if you ever went to juvenile hall or down to the parole officer's rooms in Family Court, or any place where juvenile justice is dispensed, sometimes starting in a principal's office, you would see a standard poster. The poster showed a kid with his back to you, with his pants practically falling off, and his boxers visible. The slogan on the poster let you know that this practice came from jail -- and it involved coercive sex in jail by inmates against people who couldn't fight back. I can't find a version of it online -- but it was pretty graphic. The parole officers were trying to fight this cultural fad by trying to shame boys into realizing that they were adopting prison culture that involved getting fucked up the ass. Had they but known this from the outset, they wouldn't have so casually let their pants drop appearing as if they were a chicken in jail.

So, this brings me to two pieces about Silicon Valley that remind me of how the culture that origins in butt-fucking, whether consensual or coercive, and everything that entails, can wind up being adopted and practiced by people who have no idea of its origins -- or the consequences for the culture where it originated.

Sound brutal? Well, it's meant to be.

First, there's that awful MC Siegler on TechCrunch, "I Will Check My Phone at Dinner And You Will Deal With It" -- MC is one of those snarky young men that lets you know he is the king of the world. He's decided that he's tired of being chided by his mom in restaurants -- she tells him to stop texting and playing with his i-phone aps and talk to her, and has a story up now coldly and unambiguously telling *his mom* (and everybody else's, and everybody invoking manners like his mom) to fuck off:

You can read the thread to see how many people think this is a great culture to adopt, and have started to hang out their kerchiefs, and those who don't think it's a great culture to adopt.

Then there's another story, by David Pogue, "A Parent's Struggle with a Child's iPad Addiction". It's truly, barkingly awful. He's not as snarky as TechCrunch and not as nasty, although he's written disparaging nasty comments to me in the comments section when I've questioned his adulation of tech and defense of Google. (One of the really gutless thing Pogue did was take on the challenge he accepted from the Lessig and Doctorow shill about the notion that you "make more money" by putting out free copies of your book -- and yet not report on the results. He simply refused to follow up and admit what happened. Shocking.)

Pogue has a) a rare tech piece where the columns are open and b) a piece where 600 plus comments are allowed to pile up.

It's absolutely shocking. It's about his own child, age 6, becoming addicted to an i-pad, so that he can no longer take it away without the child crying, and his caving to this child's tech addiction now by giving it to him to pacify him.

It's like what some poor adults in Afghanistan do more and more, they give their child opium to suck on so they stop crying. .Then the entire family lies there smoking or sucking opium all day long, hopelessly mired in addiction, and rely on neighbours to bring them bread and tea sometimes, until they die.

Again, rather than have me write 3,000 words, just read the comments. Appalling.

I'm one of the few people that challenges this madness, pointing out that his son is now the battery to the gadget, i.e. the thing that keeps that gadget going, which is more important than him now. He is diminished and dwindling...

The Escapist Magazine forums, known to SLers, is also waxing indignant at how it's really getting awful what those feds are doing -- as if hordes of 4channers and all kinds of gamerz and goofs on the Internet haven't been doing this for ages to fill up hate-tube comments and everything else under the sun.

So these evil people at HBGary -- my God, they're nasty, eh? -- even were involved in getting the government to procure their services, or the government was about to procure their services -- you can't quite tell where the ying and the yang start and end with these people, eh? You can see it on the zippy cool site called FedBizOpps.gov here -- they actually describe something very, very familiar to people in Second Life who see government agencies poking around all the time. They describe something that sounds in some ways like the SL Enterprise eat licenses purchased by the U.S. Navy for...whatever it is they do. Or the work of NASA. There are several open groups in SL for federal government projects, and my God, I think there are hundreds of them. Lots o' cash there, lots and lots of opportunities for the "solutions providers" gang.

The job involved creating fake personas and running them -- like an alt crew. Like somebody wanting to post to a bunch of game or virtual world forums for various purposes, either RP or world politics. Various requirements had to be met to keep the personas clean and not tracked, etc. Not a problem for Second Lifers who are masters of using proxies and alternative log ons here and there in real life to achieve the purposes stated. I think I know a guy named zFire Xue who is going to be out of a job and looking for work soon...

So, did this procurement get filled? Did HBGary do this evil thing? Well, no. They talked about it. And the government talked about it. You know, setting up fake personas, talking to people with them, getting *them* to talk. Getting a rise out of them.

You know who else did that?

The Wisconsin strikers' supporters. A blogger pretended to be a Koch brother and call up Governor Walker. They got him to "out himself," so to speak, to express his feelings. They got it all recorded. They kept their real identity hidden. And they manipulated him, got his chat log, and then published it on the forums. Oops, I mean, not the forums, because this wasn't a MMORPG or Second Life and a game, it was real life, and they published it on a hacker website called Buffalo Beast that is now overwhelmed with traffic and can't be pulled up, and of course in the mainstream media.

NPR covered it with proper indignation as did Huffington, neither of them reaching back to last week to contemplate the HBGary story and the evil thing those arrogant bad coders were going to do with persona management.

NPR also made sure to let us know they'd researched all this (just like we all have done on the SL forums about the famous Vryl Valkerie telephone call with the Herald reporter, remember?!) and it is LEGAL in New York State to have taping of "one party consent" phonecalls (the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are available with help on this legal issue, although they didn't seem to be around last week to make a statement that it really was perfectly legal for HBGary to make accounts to listen to IRC channels, persuse social media, and write it up as a proposal for more spying. Er, not spying, except when they do it. When the other guys do it, it's...it's...freedom of expression.

Spying just like Anonymous does all the time everywhere. Just like all kinds of griefers and gamerz do constantly in the world of virtuality to manipulate it. Is it any surprise?

02/22/2011

Those of us very familiar with the events in Andijan, Uzbekistan in 2005 have been watching the revolutions in the Middle East with a certain dread, wondering which of the tyrants would prove to use the methods of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's dictator for 22 years. Karimov ordered troops to mow down demonstrators in a public square and neighbouring side streets in cold blood, killing hundreds of unarmed men, women and children.

The Uzbek story began with several gunmen organizing a jailbreak of businessmen that the community felt had been unjustly jailed on dubious charges of religious extremism -- they had been organizing pickets. But the thousands who came to the square in the following days weren't armed and were just ordinary people who fully expected that finally their misery and the government's injustices would be heard and rectified.

Had there been Facebook and Twitter; had there been the intellectuals' cafe life; had there been U.S. involvement in subsidizing the economy and not merely a military base (subsequently expelled); had there been Western journalists already present -- well, and had the Kremlin's RTV behaved more like Al Jazeera -- at least the Andijan massacre would have been recorded, maybe mitigated, maybe restituted, even with ultimate change -- but it was soon forgotten. The U.S. and the EU first instituted sanctions; ultimately they had to drop them as "not working" to achieve the narrow goal of a human rights investigation and some other human rights concession, and they had to be overidden in favour of RealPolitik for the sake of energy, security and the war path to Afghanistan -- Uzbekistan gives transit permission to ship non-lethal supplies to NATO's Northern Distribution Network. An army travels on its stomach and NATO troops need 40 tons a day of fruits and vegetables. Now they'll get them from Uzbekistan. Except for a circle of concern about Uzbekistan, that includes some foreign diplomats, international NGOs, exiles in various European cities, and the Hizb-ut-Tahir, the extremist Islamic group that wants to install a caliphate -- it's hard to keep attention to the awful unfolding story of Uzbekistan, although Facebook and Twitter are among the ways this can be done.

Watching the chilling story from Libya and thinking of massacres gone by that it's hard to keep the world's attention to, and the evolving role of social media, I can't help thinking of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the role of Radio Liberty, at that time a CIA-funded U.S. broadcasting station (in the 1970s it was converted to an independent agency with Congressional oversight and funding).

At the time, when brave Hungarian freedom-fighters (some armed, some not) tried to oppose the Soviet-led invasion against their lighter brand of Communism, Radio Liberty broadcast their appeals and covered the story, and was then later accused of fomenting unrest and then not being able to save the people they had incited in any meaningful way, as the U.S. and Europe were not prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union, with its overwhelming land force and tank capacity. So while there were some brave Westerners who parachuted in or climbed over the hills to save the Hungarian partisans, Western governments ultimately could do nothing, and the Hungarian experiment perished. There was only the act of recording the bodies in the streets... Later, the defeated and bandaged freedom fighter could be celebrated as a "Man of the Year". Now that "Man of the Year" is Mark Zuckerberg; and it wasn't long ago that it was You.

I remember in the 1980s travelling to Budapest once to meet dissidents, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and retreating with a colleague into a cafe to watch a demonstration on a square on the anniversary of the 1956 anniversary, which happened to occur while we were there. I remember watching out a fly-specked rain-stained window at a handful of intellectuals trying to unfurl some posters while some police who weren't quite sure what the instructions were lately watched nervously. We had gone inside the cafe because we didn't think it prudent to be arrested while trying to perform another mission, which was to interview people for various organization's human rights reports. I didn't feel very brave that day watching other people be brave -- ah, the cafe life of the Western human rights worker, eh? As we drank some passible sludge which was the form the Turkish coffee took in this part of the world and ate a pastry that was surprisingly good even under communism. we could watch the drama unfold -- and go home afterwards. The demonstrators got a warning and not a detention -- that time.

Since the Hungarian events, there have been numerous seminars and papers and conferences on whether the U.S. government, Radio Liberty and the West in general was to blame. The record has been reviewed endlessly and I think the paper from the Woodrow Wilson Center pretty fairly gives the consensus that no, it is unfair to say that Radio Liberty is to blame for unjustly inciting people whom it couldn't save. The story is far more complex than that and the story was in part distorted by Soviet propaganda.

The paper makes for terribly interesting reading nowadays, in light of the revolutions of the Middle East, and the role of Twitter. And let's not be distracted from the fact that Radio Liberty was in the hands of the U.S. government and its Central Intelligence Agency and therefore "very different" because now, the broadcasting is in the hands of us all, but our intelligence isn't centralized.

Evgeny Morozov would be ready to make a cynical indictment (and has in his book the Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom) -- we incite demonstrators on social media by spreading the word of revolution, we can't rescue them because authoritarian governments, using the same social media, are far more powerful than us cafe intellectuals only watching people far more brave than us, and therefore...therefore...what? Morozov's thesis seems to drive us to a theory of transnational geekery and maybe even a kind of IBIB, where WikiLeaks anarchists staff a worldwide Ministry of Truth and the Interwebs are our government, ruled by, oh, Joi Ito of ICANN, who calls himself a "venture communist"...or somebody like his pal David Orban, using a vast system of "spimes" -- space-time nodules that scrape data about whatever the coders and controllers think is important, and aggregate it for them to decide to act on -- or not.

While Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe was forced through a dark night of the soul for years and had to revamp and retool its mission and undergo many painful processes of reorganization in the wake of the crushing of the Hungarian revolt, ultimately to arrive at the formation of the International Broadcasting Bureau under the U.S. Information Agency and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to oversee it with Congressional scrutiny and funding, Twitter and Facebook are private corporations. They are not even publicly traded companies where their books are open to the public.

There is no governance of these private massive platforms except by their own developers and a network of extended Silicon Valley friends. The Global Network Initiative, self-described as a "multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics" is flawed and biased with an agenda induced by some of its participants (as I'm going to explain in a lengthy post soon).

The overvaluation of these secondary stock is hugely dubious and engendering the next tech bubble, as my alter ego Prokofy Neva points out in a discussion on TechCrunch. We don't know if these new social media moguls so celebrated by our Community-Organizer-in-Chief President Obama will really be serving us so well, or even able to serve themselves with their servers, that scrape all our data to serve us ads. To be concerned, you have only to remember 2000, and the collapse of seemingly invincible free services like "Zing -- Free Photo Storage for Life!" and other zippily named websites that are now only available to see in the Wayback Machine -- or even merely to look at the demise of MySpace.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has always been a serious organization with professional broadcasters and stringent standards and review and self-correcting mechanisms for its faults. Not so Me and You, which are the people who make up Twitter and Facebook and Youtube, its faithful broadcasting friend. We make the content -- the devs are merely harvesting it for marketing information.

Are we doing a good job covering events in the Middle East, and not inciting people, and not falsely promising to rescue them?

No. Libya tells us that, like the 1956 Hungarian Revolution did, in its way, even with all the caveats of distinguished scholars like the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Of course, Me and You includes scores of Middle Eastern revolutionaries themselves -- and some Yugoslav activists for that matter -- sending advice, tips, tools -- and most important -- solidarity -- to their fellow brothers and sisters in places like Yemen, Syria -- and now Libya -- that haven't done as well as Egypt and Tunisia (and it's not over yet, and they may not keep doing better).

What can't be done is to put the genie back in the bottle, or institute some kind of "International Board of Broadcasting" over Facebook and Twitter (as much as people like Jillian York seem to imply when they boost Al Jazeera and slam everybody for not "getting it" about the Lara Long story), or tell all of us twittering and facebooking masses to shut up, and make sure not to hold out false promises or publish misleading reports. Not only would that be an unacceptable muzzle on freedom; it would be absurdly impossible

Let's not let ourselves off the hook, however, here. Everbody already long forgot Belarus' Twittered revolution of December 19, 2010 that failed -- whose leaders are now facing unfair trials without independent lawyers and getting harsh sentences like 4 years of jail merely for peacefully demonstrating in a square.

(When we see the amount of petty violence in the still relatively peaceful revolutions of the Middle East -- smashed windows, looting, overturned and burning cars, etc., doesn't the scene in Minsk seem astoundingly quiet? The door to the Elections Commissions, believed to be responsible for fraud, was bashed in and some windows were broken by clearly-documented police provocateurs caught on candid camera talking into their sleeves in hidden microphones to their commanders giving them instructions. Yet unlikes masses of demonstrators who hurled rocks in Cairo and are not going to go to jail now in Egypt, thank God, the presidential candidates of Belarus are now facing harsh and lengthy sentences, as the EU inadequately puts in place a few visa sanctions.)

And the roiling waters of Twitter are liable to close over the fate of the massacred Libyans unless the Twitterers keep vigilant and don't forget them, as they have done for Iran -- although not in as large numbers as they did when they thought the winds of freedom were at the backs of the Green Revolution.

Unlike the self-reflecting broadcaster in the hands of one superpower's intelligence agency -- a painfully quaint situation when you think of it nowadays, eh? -- Twitter and Facebook and everything like them will grow and grow, not recede now and make painful reforms. There isn't much intelligence, centralized or agentified. The danger of so much free media isn't censorship, but indifference. The payment ultimately isn't about the CRM or CPM of ad-clicking, its attention. Our attention. Will we pay it?

Let me step back to the context. Indeed, what happened in this entire incident is exactly why I always put the word "progressive" in scare quotes -- it's not, really so at the end of the day -- and what happened to Lara Logan is why I argue with Jillian, who is, at the end of the day, not a feminist, or champion of women's rights or even Internet freedom -- because of her politicization with leftist revolutionary politics. (The word "Marxism" may never be uttered by her lips; she may never contain the word in a single post, but I can't think of a better term for that politics that is so nakedly instrumental with various classic liberal ideas like "freedom" or "rights" and merely rents them for a time in pursuit of some revolutionary goal.)

I was surprised that NYU Center for Journalism immediately urgedNir Rosen to resign -- and he did -- because I thought the Center itself, with that other Rosen there (Jay) might be so utterly paralyzed with political correctness and progressivity that they mightnot see their way clear to doing this. They did! But it didn't finish the debate, and Rosen's responses after his departure only dig him in deeper and are only more despicable.

The story became one about insensitivity to a woman in distress who was sexually assaulted, and refusal to accept her "narrative" (as the critical and deconstructivist Marxists always describe one's "story" in a context that they always believe is layered with many truths, all dictated by economic forces).

The root of the story, however, wasn't sexism. It even wasn't Rosen's failure to feel sympathy for *women* or *women being raped*. (He seemed contrite enough about that bit of it.) No, that really isn't what it came down to, although that too, was part of it.

No, it was something completely different, something the "progressives" are constantly engaging in; something they say and do ALL the time; something that is on the Amy Goodmann Democracy Now! show 24/7, and that is this: saying that the mainstream media is guilty of the crimes of the Bush Administration; saying that the mainstream media is a "war monger" (as Nir called Lara Logan) merely because it is American; merely because it doesn't hew to the hard left line but develops a commercial, mainstream perspective.

Basically, I view the "war monger" statement as a lie; indeed, I view this as a Big Lie. I view it as a falsehood. I view it as a shrieking, tendentious, politicized caricature of politics; a Pravda cartoon, not any sort of real analysis.

I simply don't buy the line put out by the progressives that the New York Times or CBS "enabled" Bush's war or perpetuated myths or lies about it. They reported on the story as it was given. They have a responsibility to dig under stories as given. They did. They have too covered the wars. The notion that they somehow aided and abetted them is wrong. This is the stuff of miles of debate, of course, and it's an opinion that many on the left don't share, and I don't expect to make headway with them there.

You don't have to agree with me about the coverage of wars by U.S. media to understand something else about what it means when a media critic snarks that a mainstream journalist is a "warmonger.

And the substrate of this story is not relations between the sexes or sexist behaviour. It's more about political hatred. It's when Rosen came to feel that if any member of the mainstream press -- because it was a warmonger, for helping in wars -- went to report on Egypt, that he finds them in a false position of bad faith. He is so angered by this bad faith (in his view), that he is prepared to minimize any attack that happens to them; to minimize anything on their part that amounts to "doing their job" or "trying to get the story after it was gotten wrong". Had it been a black news anchor in the crowd who got beaten, he might have called him a sell-out; had it been a perfectly calibrated Arab-speaking American even of Egyptian nationality he would have called him a race-traitor. Identity was not the issue; politics were. The one category that the Soviets kept out of the Nuremberg accords was political belief -- everything else was grounds for sanctions against genocide -- not that. That was because it would have been used against them and their communist system.

The shrill invective, the awful hate that goes into calling someone harmed in a crowd as "deserving it" NOT because they are a woman; but because they are a "warmonger" just isn't being captured by the discussion of this issue. The issue has been bathed in the focus on male/female insensitivty to rape/rape survivor dynamic, and not the evil, nasty political judgementse of the hard left, maliciously ascribing to reporters for U.S. networks doing their jobs the insane notion that they are warmongers. So it was really only ever about the politics.

Of course, there's also the issue that Rosen also cynically then expects a warmonger, one representing an evil state broadcaster (or so it would seem, given the "progressive's" theory of that U.S. lapdog press), to exaggerate when she is assaulted by people who might have every right to attack such warmongers who supported their tormentors for 30 years.

So he said he might have only been "groped" like lots of women are, including (especiallly) Egyptian women themselves and she should "get over it". But he didn't minimize her suffering because he thought she was prejudiced against Muslim men (he left that low ground to be taken by Debbie Schlussel and the conservatives who think liberals "deserve" to be "mugged by Muslim violence"). He minimized it *because she was a warmonger*.

Now enter Jillian York -- she who could not cross the street to acknowledge that women's rights *might* be a teeny bit of a problem in a revolutionary Egyptian situation with the Muslim Brotherhood in the mix; she who scolded me as not being an expert because I raised this issue *legitimately* as Egyptian women raise it themselves.

So what does Jillian do? She undermines this story -- subtly -- and in sinister ways. As I'd expect by now she would. And I naturally speak out when I see such bad-faith politics in action, because I think if we don't speak out about the violence and viciousness condoned by the "progressives," if we don't speak out about the sly and despicable way in which they constantly undermine movements of human rights and social justice by condoning violence for the "higher cause" or the "end justifying the means" of some revolutionary, transfigurative power; if we don't speak out when they continue to smear the ordinary liberals of the mainstream media as evil "warmongers" imagining the state has greater powers than it does (or should have), we will get what we get: which is backlashes, which is Reagan or Bush or worse. It's important to save the soul of the left and the center; this is how you do it.

Jillian first *cunningly* uses the Internet forum-dwelling technique of seeming to acquiesce to the "concern" ("Concern troll," is what they call it when they out it on the right). Yes, brutal beating and sexual assault -- horrible, she says. Sure.

Then...zoom out to make it seem the moral equivalence that "we all" share. In this immediate situation of the circle of concern and Lara Logan -- those following the story beyond the initial news coverage to try to draw lessons and policy from it -- there's only one of us who has been assaulted, so to speak, and that's Lara Logan. It's not like Jillian York stepped out of her door and also had an equal-opportunity assault in Harvard Yard to illustrate that this "can happen everywhere". And yet, says Jilllian -- slyly undermining the specificity of this event so it "won't matter as much" -- this happens "every single day in every single country in the world" including the U.S. and "it happens all too frequently to reporters, too" who "all too infrequently" report their own experience.

Well, actually, no. I know lots of female journalists who have been all over the world. I've been on reporting trips in a number of countries in the world and haven't seen anything like what happened to Lara Long. A crowd. In a hugely significant square. During momentous events of change. Assaulted by numerous men. And having to be rescued by the police and women.

That's way different than being groped in a New York or Moscow subway as we all have been, or raped under awful situations as some have been. But...a mob scene? Lots of men in a crowd? All attacking one reporter whose role in the situation is set apart? That *is* different. That *doesn't* happen every day and didn't happen through all the tumult in Egypt, either. Christian Amanpour ran a gauntlet of men with iron rods and sticks; there have been incidents. This was something worse, and it's ok to say that. It doesn't diminish the "happens all over the world" part of it; it does *validate* that it happened there, happend now, and happened worse than normal. That's ok to say.

And sure, let's have 15 minutes of hate for Debbie Schlussel. Sure, I'm for that. It's a disgraceful racism and as disgusting as the casual minimizing that Rosen did at the get-go because of his overarching *political* hatred of Lara Logan for the caricature of what she "represented' to him as hateful warmongering imperialist blah blah blah.

Yes, it's truly *disgraceful* to wish lefties and liberals to be "mugged by reality". It's as bad as lefties minimizing the mugging by reality that does occur. Yes, it's not the only reality -- not the only "narrative" of this square (you can read Trudy Rubin, for example, about the amazing civic goodness at work in Tahrir and many others). It was in that place and that time for Lara Logan, and it's ok to say. Nobody should have to learn about multiple "narratives" and "realities" *that way* however. They don't learn; it creates backlash; it's despicable.

Rosen ascribes a social role to the media that was wrongful at the start -- he ascribes to it all kinds of powers imbued from it (ostensibly) by sharing in the power of the state and "lying about" its wars; for Schlussel, it's only the flip side, the evil lefty liberal media that is "brainwashing" us all and "ruining the republic" also has a social role -- a negative social role that perhaps the state, or well-meaning people can end. Both are narratives that won't let media be free; won't concede that establishment media is still free; won't concede that liberal media even remaining liberal is still free.

Freeer than Pravda, at any rate, and freer than Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned station with a certain agenda (that agenda, while very much liberating and impressive, is still an agenda that at best, moral equivocates Western evils with the evils of despotic Middle Eastern regimes; at worst, ascribes the worser of the evils to the West, or accuses the West of "causing," say, by the presence of American troops in Iraq, the terrorist-caused deaths of 100,000 people -- and no, that's not an argument you will win with the "progressives," either).

Now, Concern Troll shifts to the Admit Troll, if you will. Says Jillian: "Now, let me start by saying this: Yes, Al Jazeera and all media could have reported better on Logan’s assault, using the opportunity to educate the world about what is an incredibly pervasive issue. I do think it’s okay to criticize Al Jazeera on this."

Well, wait. "All media" did kinda report on Logan's assault -- even if not in perfectly politically correct tones. ((“In a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protestors apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter” says the LA times, in the kind of thoughtless prejudice that went into Rosen's thoughtless tweet.)

So -- having Concern Troll and Admit Troll do their groundwork, here it comes, Jillian's THAT SAID:

02/21/2011

I come from a union family -- my mother was a teacher in the Rochester City School District union for years; I had various other relatives in plant unions; my children's father was a truck driver in the Teamsters Local 237 for years. For years, I always made sure to chose a printer for any printer job that was a union shop, and put the union bug on all stationery and publications. If I could pick union-made when shopping, I would. I would never cross a picket line when I happened to see a strike by a store. I dropped donations into the pots of striking workers. I marched in peace marches with unions. I had a great deal of respect for various union leaders who took up international human rights and justice causes, like Sam Meyers, president of the United Auto Workers or Tom Kahn of the AFL-CIO (I found the Schachmanites and the anti-Communists simply more persuasive, having studied in the Soviet Union and seen the problems of communism first hand).

I've never had an opportunity to join a union because the non-profit organizations that I've worked at tended to be either of the New Left sort that disdained unions, or the kind of intellectual workers who didn't conceive of themselves as appropriately unionizing.

So why is it that someone who comes from unions, who buys the union label, who makes sure the union bug is printed, so to speak would be less than supportive of the people in Wisconsin?

And why is this post in Wired State and not A Park Bench where I put such issues?

I know the Wired State is humming when I can see the same carefully staged meme -- a picture of an Egyptian holding up a sign in support of Wisconsins -- strikers there are calling their spot "Wiscairo".

I know how those things work. I know, because I've participated in them. Little demonstrations about little things in only 10 cities, but if you get a picture of a few, and get them in a paper, it looks like you have a "national movement". Or six groups demonstrating for a cause in six countries, but put it on your website and you can look "international". I remember instinctively doing that sort of thing in various social movements, and then hearing Robin Morgan, the famous feminist, explaining this technique at a talk with Soviet feminists. You get that picture of that one person in Wisconsin or Idaho -- they could be all alone and there could only be one of them or two of them -- but if you put that together with the other twos and threes and fours in other cities, you could then begin to speak of our "Wisconsin chapter" and "solidarity with our sisters in Idaho" and before you know it, there was a movement. That's how it's done. Somebody consciously sat down and penned that poster either for or with that Egyptian and got it on the wires: pure and simple.

And it worked like a charm:

o my old-line socialist friends from the Schachmanite groups like YPSL reprinted the picture on their Facebook walls, thrilled at the international solidarity it represented

o various Internet freedom gurus on Twitter printed the link to it

o and a gentleman farmer friend from Second Life who used to be a social media maker in Silicon Valley prints it -- and the debate we have with him reveals he's against the union but still thinks it's cool

o various neighbours on Facebook or Russians on Live Journal publish it -- look! the world's on fire! it's everybody! It's like Egypt here, too! Wheeeee!

Except, if you get debating and talking, you discover not everybody is quite that thrilled. Even teachers in unions you know. Even public sector workers. Even people who are in unions in other states. And then especially people who aren't in unions -- any more. Who are freelancers. Who are unemployed.

Because they feel like when a public sector union demands a bigger cut, we all have to pay, and it's not fair. It's like the striking subway workers in New York City a few years ago and higher transit fees -- boy, they sure had no supporters.

On the one hand, if you want a functioning state and you want a place for jobs for people, you have to have public sector unions. Or so it seems. Many have started challenging this, and I'm interested to see the argumenation:

o they don't make stuff

o they are hand-out jobs anyway, they shouldn't get more

o they are gouging too much

o and this one from someone posting with the name "IPI" at the Times -- this one I had never thought of, and which really gave me pause, against Paul Krugman:

"It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy." [Krugman]

[IPI] If there is oligarchy in the US the public unions would certainly be counted in its ranks. They surely rank even ahead of large corporations in the public extortion racket.

Many years ago unions were created as a counterweight to unaccountable corporations. Who are public unions supposed to fight – evil democratically elected governments?

That totally sums up my beef with the "progressives" these days -- their supporting of all kinds of movements -- WikiLeaks, Egyptians, Wisconsin workers -- as if they are all part of a lovely democratic ramrod that is going to break down the door of some evil thing. So what is that evil thing again, kids? Well, Mubarak, sure, we all get that. Gov. Walker? Well, yeah, we get that he's Republican and we're "supposed" to hate him, but isn't he also having to balance a budget? And then what's that other thing? Obama? In the elected democratic government?

Why? That's when the "progressives" give away the store. That's when the mask slips and their hand shows -- they are not for democracy and betterment and people empowerment -- except in an instrumental way as a ramrod to achieve power for "the avante garde" -- themselves.

And yes, I get it about collective bargaining. Yes, that should not be removed, and yes, it's worth striking for. But that's not how this fight started. It might *only* be about that now (according to some) but it started with a bid for more pay. More pay at a time when everyone has a little or even a lot less and food prices are higher.

I loathe Paul Krugman with a passion. We've voted for the same president. We're in the same political party. We both have compassion for the downtrodden and care about human rights and social justice. But I find him loathesome -- why? Because I think he is manipulative and insincere, and I think he is a zealot who squeezes and twists the facts that may indeed be factual to drive people to a certain belief system. I find that coercive. Because he is sly and cunning and stealthy about sneaking in socialist views that are frankly illiberal and oppressive themselves, and coy about ever naming them as such -- indeed, expert at dodging and deflecting any such labeling or attacks.

Oh, you say, you don't see it? Whatever could I have in mind! Well, if you are sincere, if you are willing to make a close textual analysis of Krugman's cliches and Krugman's memes, you'll see it. Today is a PERFECT example of the Pravda cartoon that he buries in just about every column these days.

Because he constantly engages in eliminationist rhetoric against the right wing; they can never have a right to exist or be compromised with, but have to be written out of existence through "logic". They are never diverse or complex; the forces that shape are destinies aren't complex either; they are stark and minimalist and a caricature.

I dislike the Nobel Prize prize for him; it strikes me that it is not for any particular economic insight, but merely for being a popular leftist columnist of the sort Europeans salivate at when they find in the United States, which they believe to be a vast horrible land of lumpenproletariat Fox-TV watching SUV driving Wal-mart shopping gun-toting Rush Limbaugh listeners thumping their Bibles. The Nobel is a thunderous pat on the head of that sort of strain in American politics that European think they socially engineer and cultivate with the prize; the granting of the prize to Obama, despite two unjust wars, was of a piece with this notion.

What, you say? Eliminationist rhetoric coming from that fire, the Krugman? What do I mean?

Well, take today's piece ranting about Wisconsin. Take this paragraph, that wildly accuses Gov. Walker of figuring out which workers are Republican and exempting them from his action (could anybody question that? Could anybody back that up?!)

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Why do I find something like this...quaint? Why do I find it...creepy, this actual *disempowering* of me, as a newspaper reader, voter, protestor -- reduced to being whipsawed by evil oligarchs, cringing under the domination of only a "handful"? Gosh, where are they, those handful! Let's get' em! Hisssss!!!

It reminds me of Pravda and Izvestia articles which I used to study in a special course at Leningrad State University on the rhetoric of socialism, if you will; a course called stranovedeniye ("country knowledge") but was really a kind of indoctrination process in how to appreciate the Soviet state via its many newspapers. We had a wonderful professor, with the very same first name and patronymic as Pushkin, who used to teach us about gazetnyye shtampy, or "newspaper cliches" and how to understand them. You know, like "Certain circles of imperialism..." "running dogs of capitalism" -- that sort of thing.

"Dominated by handfuls". It's a bald and even course characterization of the world, with evil Mr. Moneybags and his cane and the glint in his monacled eye on the one hand, and brawny Labour in his bursting blue workshirt on the other, toiling under a turning grindstone.

"Billionaires with armies of lobbyists" you say? My, that sounds awful. But we know (Robin Morgan taught us; Micah Sifry and Nancy Scola teaches us!) that you can make your 17 1/2 people in Peoria look like they constitute a multitude with the right light and mirrors. The Internet amplifies amazingly, and one noisy Twittering zealot can make it seem as if he has enormous clout, especially if you see 10,000 followers and can't page through to find that their all prostitutes and SEO gurus.

And say, can't lobbyists and their astroturfers be financed by other billionaires than the Koch brothers? To read Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, the Koch brothers are single-handedly running all the media and Youtubes in the world, and you would never know that George Soros and other financiers existed with their clout and their clauses. Indeed to hear Glenn Beck tell it, it's all the fault of Soros, not the Koch brothers -- as if every individual with an opinion, every group in society is a mere conveyor belt for a rich man's sympathies. As if any of these groups, right or left, never have to *persuade* the skeptical and not so dumb American people to join this or that cause, at the end of the day.

And I marvel, and my faith in my fellow Americans is restored, when I see a robust 400 plus people liking the post of the guy or gal who stands up to Krugman today, and calls him out on his phony Pravda Soviet cereal-box political cliches, and points out that the public sector unions *are* one of the power brokers and oligarchs *too*. Hooray! And then it goes down the line -- it's breath-taking to behold, the huge number of people *disagreeing* with Paul Krugman, and *getting votes*. It's really a joy. It's something to frame and teach in journalism class for decades to come.

Now, some would see this as an unravelling of the social fabric blah blah -- I have one girl ranting at me in Facebook that I must not care if state employees earn 80 percent less than their equivalents in the private sector, i.e. a doctor in a city hospital. And I have a tweeter in my followers guilt-tripping us all by asking us "what kind of American" would rally to deny wages to another American?

Answer: Oh? 80 percent less than millions of dollars a year? And....what kind of American? An American who saw his own wages would be cut with heavier taxes if the public sector employee got a greater percentage of his healthcare co-payment covered? Just thinking out loud here, mind you...

I don't have health insurance, I pay for all my bills, and so I don't weep for Wisconsin tonight.

And I'm finding I have lots of unexpected company with this sentiment, and it makes me realize that unions are no longer a form that will enable people to fight for a living wage and fair working conditions -- or at least, not *sufficiently* a vehicle for that fight for every sector. The New Left (New New New Left, too) is happy with that conclusion, as they find American unions too over-stuffed and fat and in bed with corporations. One of the marvels of our time -- really a historic and moving event -- was the Filibernie -- the filibuster staged by socialist Congressman Bernie Sanders, who came well prepared for his marathon speechifying with lots of papers on how union leaders themselves were part of the problem in shipping jobs overseas and in unjust conditions for some sectors -- Bernie went after the fat-cats of Wall Street and the bail-out bunch from all the banks and insurance companies, but had lots to say about unions, even while remaining a staunch supporter of them.

Why don't I get on the union bus, the bus of Common Dreams and other socialist-inspired organizations from Egypt to Wisconsin and points beyond?

Because it didn't stop in Darfur. It didn't stop in Minsk. It stopped to shake its fist and gloat over the misery of HBGary and its collusion with the evil Bank of America, but it didn't find a way to make a bus that could go to a demonstation about extortionist $35 banking fees. Not even if Ariana Huffington paid...

The last thing I would have expected to find on the front page of this venerable news service (where I used to edit two weeklies and still contribute occasional pieces) would be the logo of the Leninist thugs' club called Anonymous.

I think this sort of thing happens for several reasons. One, the young people writing on Iran probably just haven't followed Anonymous in other settings -- or they don't care. Or they actually think it's cool (I've caught several of them in fact on Twitter loving up the idea of DDOSing businesses that refused to park illegal dox on their servers -- there's something even government-related workers find sort of awesome sauce about WikiLeaks).

This *is* the Obama Administration, after all, and this Congressionally-funded broadcasting operation, while carefully independent in its editorial work and reporting, still can tilt to the left or right with the prevailing winds at times. There's also the fact that to be cool and with-it, they've put ENORMOUS work into covering all the Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky cyber-skepticism stuff (Anonymous wrote the book on cyber-skepticism -- and want to make sure no one ever uses the Internet in ANY way except what they think it should be used for). RFE/RL has lots of blogs and articles following tech, the Internet, social media, etc. This is how they can stay relevant and supported in a world of severe budget cuts. So they would argue "we are merely reporting this as one of many stories".

Well, you report on the National Bolsheviks and Limonov, too, but you don't put him on the front page or describe his group's work for poor pensioners in glowing terms without a little more, well, judgement.

And Anonymous?! Really?! On the front page? The story in and of itself isn't such "news" as to warrant that treatment; and even if it did belong in a blog or a regional service, it could have gotten a lot more critical assessment.

Here's a comment I've left in the moderators' queue:

I'm really disgusted with RFE/RL for falling for this active measure by one of the most thuggish organizations on the Internet. A few little caveats buried at the end of the piece don't cut it. Far from "hactivists" that only do good, Anonymous activists are cynical bullies who harass all kinds of people they don't like and attack those who refuse to be intimidated into supporting their criminality -- they're not only the ones who took down the sites Paypal, Amazon, MasterCard and others, every day they engage in intimidating, criminal behaviour all over the Internet on thousands of sites, causing loss of business, disruption of communities, and loss of privacy. Lost in all the coverage of the HBGary scandal, for example, is awareness that the actual parties committing criminal acts are not the hapless geeks who overhyped their PowerPoints, but the Anonymous gangsters in the IRC channel.

This very well organized and not "loose" group, very likely infiltrated by foreign intelligence agencies and transnational organized crime, is very selective about their targets. They might help Egypt and Iran today -- opportunistically, superficially-- but they won't help democracy in Belarus or Sudan. And yesterday indeed they harassed young girls on Myspace or bullied disabled people on Youtube or took down even trendy websites like gawker.com merely because they critically report on them. Tomorrow, they'll come for *you* if you report on them critically.

If you accept Anonymous as your friend, Iranians at RFE/RL and elsewhere, and think they're just wonderful, tomorrow you will no longer have your freedoms. They are like the Bolsheviks in that regard.

The DDOS is not a legitimate form of activity. It's not "civil disobedience". It's the use of a weapon, like the Black Panthers used weapons and killed people and weren't what they seemed to some liberals at first. There's nothing "progressive" about all this, and these people are cunning cynics, merely engaging in the latest "active measure" like the Kremlin (and in fact, often on .ru servers!) and distracting people from their true nature.

02/18/2011

As I've described in a lengthy introduction, I encountered the phenomenon of Anonymous, often described as a "looseknit online community of hackers," in the virtual world of Second Life. I've detailed three major incidents that defined my involvement, starting with a comment on their offensive art; then moving to abuse reports on their violations of the Terms of Service inworld; and progressing to regular documentation of their raids and posses against me, my tenants and others in the virtual world. In time, I began to follow their activities elsewhere on the Internet, but I don't claim any special expertise or knowledge; I just claim common sense and a basic willing to report the truth -- something that is often absent in the treatment of Anonymous by the mainstream media and various blogs, whether by tech specialists, "progressives" or conservatives.

1. The most fundamental truth about Anonymous is that they lie: they lie about little things and big things; they lie about lying; they lie about lying about lying -- and so on.

2. Anonymous is not a looseknit movement. It's very structured, in fact. It has very rigid cultural norms and rules; it has very strict lines of communication. It is a cult and its members behave like cult members and its leaders behave like cult leaders. To describe Anonymous as "loose," like, say, a Facebook group that "likes" Coca Cola or Lady Gaga is "loose," or a group that teens make on Facebook with names like Didyouhearthatstupidthingmrhallsaidtoday is "loose" is to not get it about gangs, cults, dysfunctional movements of various types -- they are all about rigidity; they are all about very, very stiff and not fluid relations. Anonymous is often described as some really versatile franchise that enables the franchiser to pick from a huge menu of options. That would be like saying a McDonald's franchiser can put out baked home-made sweet potatoes instead of standard frieds made in standard Fry-Max with standard seasoning. It's simply untrue. You have only to watch and look and stop reading tripe in the media.

3. Anonymous is not anonymous. First of all, Anonymous are people like your best friend's son or your uncle's coworker -- you know them. Secondly, they are definite people with definite identities who do very specific acts -- those who rise to the level of actually leading and perpetrating attacks are not so great in number, are known, especially inside the movement, and are identified by law-enforcement and intelligence and even journalists or casual observers. They trip up and expose themselves many times; they are exhibitionists and want to be caught many times and be heroes/martyrs. If Anonymous were really so, it wouldn't have to tell you. That's all.

4. Anonymous are caught; they go to jail. The man who broke into Sarah Palin's mail account was sentenced to one year. Five Anonymous activists were arrested in the UK over the WikiLeaks scandal; there are many others who have in fact been arrested and known. Nearly all the dozens of people in SL are known and identified and banned several times over.

5. Anonymous is not legion; its numbers are fairly small. To be sure, the lookie-loos and the day-trippers and weekend w-hatters may seem like a lot of people at times, but even they fit into the usual online power curve of 10 percent of any community who do anything at all while the rest watch, and are a tiny percent of that 10 percent (less than one). Anonymous numbers have been fairly accurately assessed by some smart people who have noticed a thing that they all inevitably do and have tabulated it, and put the numbers ranging from about 8700 to 12,500 around the world, with seasonable and episodic variations -- but with only about 700-800 who actually plan and execute major attacks. Like Wikipedia and other online cults, there is a tiny number of collectivized leaders, sometimes turning over frequently, who make major decisions.

6. 4chan.org is a big part of Anonymous; so is the sub-board known as /b/ (hence the nickname "b-tards"). Saying 4chan.org is a mere images board where people trade jpeg pictures is like saying the SDS was merely a student group that discussed textbooks. The main action at 4chan.org is the long chats in forums where the pictures are merely a kind of prop to the chat. 4chan.org is where attacks are planned and coordinated; 4chan is where people can get links to the various other chat places and IRC channels and pastebin.org chatlogs. If the authorities want to cut to the chase and stop fooling around with expensive security firms that embarrass themselves by doing retarded things like going in an IRC chat and deciding they now have a list of Anonops, they could more strategically simply call in Ken Lerer, the owner of the holding company of Huffington Post, and Christopher Pool, the owner of 4chan.org whom Ken Lerer has hired as an adisor on what is "cutting edge," and have a chat with them about what is on their servers. They will deny involvement in DDOS attacks but will in fact have inevitably participated in them, and they can stop them by having 4chan take a public position and by backing it up with bans and blocks. They won't do that. That's the problem. See no. 7.

7. Anon is not reformable. Members of Anon never truly leave the organization when they claim to; they may cease griefing expeditions for a time but always come back. They lie about reforming; they are never sincere. Think "Eddie Haskell".

8. A popular griefing mechanism of Anon involves a dramatic claim of a come-to-Jesus moment when a griefer realizes "the error of his ways" and "quits griefing". After his confession and altar-call, he "reforms" and takes up an activity like "volunteering for Relay for Life" at the American Cancer Foundation or some other charity. This is always fake, and is merely another operation. After gulling innocent first-timers and even gullible repeat-believers, they come back and grief again -- Lucy and the football, Charlie Brown.

9. You can never know enough about Anonymous. You are always wrong, and always off balance.You said they were in this faction; they were in the other one. You claimed they were behind this hacking; they were actually not, but behind another that didn't have their fingerprints. You are stupid; they are clever. You don't get it; they are on the inside. You thought you were a specialist; guess what, you were played. Anonymous is all different than you say! Anonymous is all wonderful! You aren't!

10. You can never hope to keep up with the memes and inside jokes. You thought "cool story bro" was the joke of the week? You are hopelessly behind the times and a newb and a feeb. Oh, you hope to establish your savvy by indicating that in fact it's "You mad bro?" this week? You couldn't be more wrong. 4channer girls are laughing hysterically about "Perhaps....dresses?" this week...and you aren't...but you're a girl, aren't you?

11. Anonymous are thought to be closet gays, or gays unhappy with their sexuality, or ambivalent bisexuals, or transgendered males changing to females. Perhaps some of this is true, but there is another factor that explains more about their character and their sexuality: they are autoerotics. They have come to find online-assisted masturbation so compelling that they attracted to other men not because of homosexuality, but because of insular autoeroticism. A real homosexual is capable of falling in love with another man or at least of affection; the Anonymous is a narcissist in love with himself and his online reflections. Other people are toilet paper to him. In fact, their chief form of eroticism is more about power than sex -- they get off on victimizing other people and making them feel helpless. That's their aphrodisiac, and it's essentially one of narcissism, not concession of and empathy with the other -- it's just the opposite, annihilation of the other.

12. Far from being anarchists in the details of their online lives, Anonymous in fact are finicky and particular and heavy control freaks. They like order and repetition. They crave the incessant repetition of the same pictures and words over and over again like toddlers having to see the same video or hear the same story again because it helps order their chaotic nervous systems and cope with their overstimulation. They are not free; they are under heavy constraint. They need to do the same thing over and over and over again *in the same way*, like obsessive-compulsives and bear striking resemblance to them. They can repeat the same griefing action incessantly, day after day, with crushing boredom and regularity because it sooths them not only to get the same reaction out of another person and annoy them, but also to gain a sense of power from the routine. That this makes it easier to catch them doesn't seem to bother them; their need for repetition is GREAT.

13. Far from being loose-knit, the Anonymous movement is very structured. It has strict codes of conduct, definite lines of authority, very precise marching orders. Many an observer, close or far, has mistaken the Politburo-like "democratic centralism" of the movement, where a topic or action might be discussed "freely" in a group as being "loose knit"; in fact, the rituals and procedures for the topics and debates are very limited, and bear no resemblance to open parliamentary debate or Roberts Rules of Order; they are a cult, even if not listed on rickross.com

14. Many people think that Anonymous is successful because it has lots of people and can easily and flexibly decide in an uncoordinated way to do various actions -- as noted, it is considered to be a kind of vast franchise where ideas spread like wildfire and get acted upon. In fact, Anonymous doesn't work like the flu or a viral video, but works like an army -- there are recognized cult leaders and recognized signals of authority. While any effort to try to isolate some badge or code of authority would fail, there are markers and signals that a few key individuals develop and spread with rigid connivance.

15. One of the more retarded things a certain faction of Anonymous tried to do was start a caper that involved hacking a weather site and claiming that they were trying to "hack winter" and "make it spring." This action was taken directly after the hacks (yes they are hacks) of Amazon, PayPal, etc. and was designed as a counterspin against a growing public dislike and distrust of the movement -- a period when it was ceasing to be cool and being now alarming. This dodge and feint was a flop and convinced nobody and never attracted significant following among the ranks to catch on. Anonymous always reverts to ugly, horrid form -- it is not evolving or getting better, and more than the Lord's Resistance Army is "getting better".

16. In the same way, a false flag operation (FBI or other foreign intelligence or freelance security operatives mounting an action made to look like Anonymous and confuse them) mounted not long after the Paypal attacks, implying that now a "new" Anonymous was being born that would focus on political causes like attacking the Egyptian government's sites wasn't typical and wasn't convincing. This effort of hostile outsiders or possibly an insider faction hoping to distract the public with a positive message wasn't typical. Whether it had significant backing or whether it was just a cynical dodge, soon the b-tards were back hacking and slashing again like they always had and this dodge made no difference.

17. Nobody can stop or call off Anonymous or deflect them. The confused and babbling John Perry Barlow, now in his dotage, that he had "called off" people that had "misunderstood" or "overreacted" to his call to war in cyberspace is absurd (and an admission of guilt -- how can you "call off" that which you claim you hadn't "called on"?)

18. The movement has not changed or matured or evolved. Some members are visibly associating themselves with the Egyptian cause; but the same or other members are going around harassing online worlds and communities with horrible obscene and racist content, and attacking the firm HBGary, and telling the female executive to show her tits in chat messages. All the ugly and disgusting behaviour continues; all the racist and sexist talks continues everywhere, merely distracted from.

19. The fight against Scientology was not a fight for freeodom or human rights or secularity against religious cultism; it was a competition by one cult with another, by a newer online cult by an older one that was among the first to harness the earliest forms of the Internet for its cause. It's a gang war for turf, and not a liberal struggle for rights for all.

20. Anonymous have a concerted plan to fan out to forums and argue with people who criticize them in various formulaic ways -- lying, obfuscating, challenging the critic's credentials, or using the Saul Alinsky tactics, as they conservatives call them, of picking out some feature of the target and exaggerating it, or picking out some aspect of the issue and insisting that it's in the target's own interests to agree with them, or part of the target's own values to concede their point. Always and everywhere, Anonymous tell you that you are wrong about whatever you think of their movement; that you don't have that facts; that you mixed something up; that you have laughably taken something too seriously.

21. Anonymous often word-salads or obfuscates various technical issues; they describe themselves as having "2,000 nodes" (Jacob Appelbaum), something giving precise numbers to lies to make them seem more convincing.

22. Anonymous are not teenagers are young men only. In fact, many are 30-40-50 year old men, some with prestigious IT jobs or academic or media jobs. Anonymous is a professor or an executive, not just a kid in his mom's basement.

23. Anonymous is penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies. This wasn't hard to do given both the ostensibly loose nature of the movement *and* the rigid culture which makes it brittle and unable to resist undermining -- it is very easy captivated or manipulated in fact. The Russian FSB seems to be obviously at work here, and there are quite a few examples of the use of sites with the RU address, various Russian cultural features, not to mention of course the Soviet memes, which are sometimes adopted as a joke, to tweak what they see as fanatical critics invoking their Leninism, but which also has its roots in actual belief systems.

24. Anonymous has what is called the "bro code". This brotherly set of ethics, if you will, chiefly involve never reporting on a fellow member to authorities such as police. When this appears to happen, it is often part of an elaborate caper that is itself merely setting up the next griefing operation. Those appearing to turn state's evidence may be involved in merely a more elaborate form of social hack.

25. Probably 75 percent or more of Anonymous hacks are social hacks that don't involve actual computer programming skills. They involve spying on or simply observing people and gathering clues about them to use to guess or attempt to produce their password or to find some other aspect of their lives online or off that can be accessed.

26. But Anonymous themselves have the same propensity for leaving enormous numbers of clues to their identities and activities online that they are not particulary good at covering up. They have a propensity, like all totalitarian movements seeking total power, to document their crimes as a form of narcissism and cultic reinforcement. Often, they make tapes of phone conversations; they compulsively save chatlogs; they make video tapes of themselves griefing or planning to grief, and they can't help showing off, online and in real life. The videos in particular often contain telltale clues to their locations and corroborating evidence that helps establish who they are despite careful work by their enablers to hide their real names (*waves to Mullet Handelsohn*).

27. The downfall of many an Anon is the victory dance. The victory dance usually has to follow each griefing posse or raid or major DDOS attack or other hacking operation. It is an essential part of the ritual and has to be participated in and documented. It is no fun crashing a server or hacking into an email system and publicizing its contents if you can't go somewhere afterwards and have a party to wash down the success, as it were; the victory dance often involves elaborate manifestations of the memes and catch phrases, where not only is the story told and retold, but those who didn't participate and who may even keep strategic distances from the actual perpetrators may show up, on a guest appearance, to tacitly give their nod of approval in some way. Somebody who elaborately hid his tracks with proxies while griefing might log on from his home to go to a victory dance by mistake.

28. Anonymous always tries to minimize the damage they have caused. They scoff and snort outright at anyone putting costs to damages; they decry the "Internet as srs business", they say that victims are "butthurt". They always remind people that online life isn't real; if they are crying about a rape in cyberspace, they are indignantly told to grasp the horror of real rape. An online virtual rapist thrusting a giant penis in somebody's face in Second Life might simultaneously also angrily tell you on a forums that his sister was raped; that we have no idea of the pain and how dare we compare these utterly unlike things. This pixel peniser might in fact even volunteer for a group in SL doing real-life fund-raising for victims of domestic violence, just to show you what a good guy he is, and laugh all the while at your protestations that his behaviour is inconsistent and unfair.

29. Anonymous always tells you that they never forget, that they remember slights and punish them for ages, relentlessly. Yes and no. Anonymous are capable of planning an elaborate raid, but suddenly logging off in boredom because something better came up on TV. They may stalk you for months and suddenly stop, because they got bored or simply found a jucier target. Some of them are methodical and repetitive, but just as many have ADHD.

30. Anonymous talk a good game and brag a lot; they vowed to take down AT&T just because their site was blocked for a time when it was a victim of a DDOS attack. They made the most violent and horrible comments about AT&T and its executives, but stopped short of any RL violence or even hacking attacks once AT&T executives made a statement that the site had only been temporarily blocked. In fact, Anonymous often stops short of crossing that blood-brain barrier called of "taking it to real" -- going into real life to pursue somebody online. They don't mind getting b& but they don't want to go in the real-life paddy wagon downtown.

31. Anonymous never shows solidarity to their fellows when arrested. It's as if they died in World of Warcraft and their characters got teleported home to respawn later if the right potion is found. They never mention them. They never defend them. They never sign petitions. They never speak to the media about them. They never try to reason with anybody to get them out. They turn their backs on those fallen behind enemy lines, and never look back, like brave little soldiers in war. An arrested Anonymous is easy to break because he has no solidarity, no brotherhood, nothing like an old-world mafia to fall back on. This is both a strength and a weakness of Anon. To be sure, Anon might laughingly make graveyards of banned avatars or mentioned banned people in reverential tones but they never cross the street to actually defend them.

32. Many times Anonymous claim they do things just for laughs -- for the lulz. Other times they imply, but never rally specify, that they are engaged in some short-term goal of "doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do," i.e. fighting Scientologists or the Egyptian government. The reality is that Anonymous has a very conscience and very specific purpose that is very deeply and zealously felt by every cult member: they wish to prevent anyone from using the Internet in any way they think it should not be used, and especially not to take it seriously.

33. Sometimes Anonymous is believed to be a new cutting-edge progressive movement, some sort of new form of online democracy. In fact, Anonymous is profoundly conservative. Its structures resemble more of an 18th or 19th century Masonic Lodge than they resemble casual Facebook groups in the newest form of social media. Anonymous has leaders; it has followers. It has codes; it has rituals. It has a certain way of doing things; and has ruthless conformity procedures.

34. Anonymous is most ruthless to its own people. It will use the most outrageous pressure tactics. If somebody's parents have to be called up to harass a young person out of line, that will be done; if somebody fails to conform, they can be harmed at their job with a deliberate harassment tactic or pizzas can be sent to their door or even the SWAT team of the local police urged to storm the apartment.

35. Anonymous is often described as having "16 year old girls" in it. These are more than likely men in drag, i.e. 30 or 40 year old men taking on the persona of a 16 year old girl. This is very, very common. There are, to be sure, real 16 year old girls, but not that many of them.

36. Although they are styled as anarchists at heart and indeed do hew to the traditions of Bakunin and others, they are in fact strict legalists, always and everywhere fanatically invoking law and rules and procedures. On every forum, they will invoke TOS regulations, even the most obscure paragraphs; on any chat discussion they will cite Constitutional clauses or Supreme Court decisions or various arcane agency regulations with superior and smug glee; they can be the most assiduous abuse-reporters on any platform and take keen delight in bringing down someone else on a technicality. Always and everywhere, this apparenty legalism is a sham -- it is lawfare that exploits law to wage a war; it is a distraction from their own inherent lawlessness. They are legal nihilists, that is, they do not care to have any rule of law over themselves. They prefer "rule-by-laws" that breeds arbitrariness rather than "rule of law" that would imply some higher power to which they were accountable.

37. While they pride themselves as being Anonymous, faceless, colourless, melting into the crowd, in fact, the b-tards cling fiercely to identifying marks -- groups they join, nicknames, memes, pictures. If a moderator of a board were to rule that the name Anonymous or Anon E. Moose cannot be used, or rule that no pictures of suits with question marks over the heads can be used, or no Guy Fawkes masks -- that is, to behave like a high school principal in New York City might behave to demand the removal of gang insignia -- they will erupt into an uproar of outrage about the suppression of their free expression and the supposed hysteria and drama and "security theater" sins of the moderators. They will downplay the significance of insignia that in fact they hold dear. The most important thing is the group and its name.

I first encountered Anonymous in the online virtual world of Second Life in September 2004, although I had seen similar negative movements in the Sims Online functioning like mafias (the Sim Shadow Government) starting in 2000. In 2003-2004 in the early years of Second Life, Anonymous was called W-hat, a spin-off from somethingawful.com and ebaumsworld.com called "griefers," people who caused grief to others online just for the malicious glee they could get from it. (They were definitely the same people, so efforts to claim they were different or unrelated are silly.)

In SL, the W-hat started first as a sandbox griefing staging area on a mainland sim called Baku, then for a time was an "art sim" island with grotesque, offensive scenes; one was the 3-D pair of World Trade Center towers in a kind of morbid Valentine, with the caption "I'm falling for you" and people falling out of windows and dying. Some of us on the forums said we didn't think it was art, and was offensive; I noted that I had lived through 9/11 in New York, lost one of my jobs in it, and knew neighbours and fellow parishioners who were killed or injured. Of course, it wasn't cool to be offended by "art"; we were harassed and pilloried and bullied but I didn't think any of it. I had merely expressed my opinion along with hundreds of others about the art, and what I hadn't called for was its removal; I has just expressed my opinion that it wasn't art, but vandalism.

To my surprise, I was singled out for a vicious attack -- an avatar with a day-old account sounding like a fake Muslim name came to my simulator, where I had a seafood shack and a boardwalk and dance floor, during an event I was having, and flew a plane straight into the building, scattering the customers. Then he returned wearing a giant stalking World Trade Center on himself, and came after me, bumping and striking my avatar down. I was stunned. It was one thing to have bad art that was really offensive on your own sim -- you had a right to that, and if no one liked it, they didn't have to come and look at it -- that was a kind of fundamental principle of this online world (although on the mainland with contiguous sims, you could have the problem of offensive content right in your view).

But it was quite another thing to be flying on to my sim, and forcing that "art" on me in the form of a griefing attack, harassing my customers, making them flee, making me lose business and time. I found this gravely wrong; abuse reporting the incident did nothing. Despite the outrageous behaviour, and the system's capacity at that time to accurately record "bumps" which were not allowed, the Muslim-named avatar remained for some time, finally being banned for other reasons of griefing other people on other sims, but merely returning on a new alt. He was to go on relentlessly, fiercely, obsessively stalking and griefing me for the next six years.

This wasn't because I was "butt-hurt" or "QQd" (cried) or whined or made myself out to be a victim or thought the Internet was "srs business" -- taking it too seriously. Trust me, I know the difference between my children's classmate's father getting killed in a real tower crashing, and my avatar getting hit in an online world you can log off from any time, and which is only pixelated hurt. I don't need any extra tutelage on this subject.

But merely because I said it was wrong; merely because I said it wasn't right; because I wrote about it on the forums and on my blog, I was relentlessly targeted. Indeed, a number of other victims would whisper to me -- "don't feed the trolls; don't publicize it; don't talk about it; then they won't grief you." I said I wouldn't play it that way; that was too much like the Soviet dissidents I knew, and later human rights activists in Russia or Belarus, where the KGB would say, "Don't talk about this interrogation or search; don't discuss this beating you had in detention or on the street, and it will go better for you". Or they'd say to relatives, "Don't talk about your arrested love one to foreign press; don't get the word out to Radio Liberty; keep your mouth shut, and your relative will be let go." That seldom worked; I didn't see any reason to think it would work in a virtual world.

I didn't think much more about that particular incident, but it wasn't long before I was flying around the world and caught sight of some of the W-hats building a "grief tower" on a sim for sale where the owner did not have on autoreturn. The famous land baron of that era, Anshe Chung, believed in not putting on autoreturn so that people could test out a house or store on the land first, and see how it fit or if they liked it. That friendly gesture meant to entice more customers was exploited by these goons (as they called themselves) to put up giant phalluses, huge textures of obscene or racist or ugly pictures, various memes and loud noise makers and particle flashers -- all for the lulz. It ensured the land would never sell and all the neighbours would have an eyesore they couldn't do anything about.

So I decided to abuse report it to the company, Linden Lab. I thought it was wrong. I told a Linden (the managers of the world) about it, and he went to observe the scene, but did nothing. I was puzzled by his obvious inaction (I was to many more instances of leniency and outright collusion of Linden Lab with these goons in the coming years) but AR'd it anyway, and went on my way. I forgot about it. But they had spotted me chatting to the Linden, and perhaps something *was* done to some of them -- because they then began to relentlessly stalk me on "god-mode" -- a system which they had recently hacked. That meant wherever I went on the grid, they would turn up at my elbow -- as if they were on my friendship card with map-tracking permissions (which they obviously didn't have). They would sit on top of me, sit down next to me, sit on my head, whereever I went. If I tried to hold an event of any kind -- I would hold job fairs or architectural contests with prizes in those days -- they'd arrive en masse, troll me and spam stupid comments to disrupt the meeting, or fill up the sim so no people genuinely interested in the events could get there.

They also used the far-sighedness of this mode to follow me even if I could get to my own property where I could put them in the ban list -- they could then place prims on my land (before that possibility became blocked) or take long sticks or spikes and try to poke them at my avatar and so on.

They also created "mega prims" -- huge prims that were outside of the normal capacity of the system to make -- created as an exploit. Then they scoured the Internet for some news articles about me, found my real life picture, and pasted it to the giant object, so that not only would I have to stare at giant pictures of myself -- they would flash them around in big particle blasts on self-replicating prims and annoy all my tenants and neighbours.

All of this was routine to me by now -- I merely abuse reported it, told my tenants how to mitigate it, and tried to recover my business after they were scared away. I went through a particularly harsh period where certain exploits were mercilessly and repetitively used against me -- but more to the point my tenants. I was inured to seeing some stupid particle blast or obscenity or whatever -- it was just juvenile behaviour and I had seen it before in the Sims Online and it didn't upset me. I was trying to run a little business, as well as engage in various creative pursuits, but I didn't feel so immersed in this virtual world that it would "get to me" if someone pushed a giant prim with a goatse picture on it. I closed the window and logged off, or I put on "hide particles" and got rid of the view if I could manage to in the storm of spinning junk. I abuse reported the day-old alts and went on.

Not so my tenants. Especially people new to the world; especially females; especially females who were 30-50 years old or older -- they were terribly upset. They literally weeped. They felt terribly violated when a giant picture of the Tub Girl materialized over their home. They became actively traumatized, especially if they were new to online worlds (they weren't gamers). If someone poked a giant penis into their house, it freaked them out and made them hysterical. Worst of all, if the griefers someone managed to click on the poseballs in their sex beds or sex furniture with sex animations, or rez their own poseballs, they could simulate a rape. While women were more bothered by these sexual assaults -- and yes, they were sexual assaults even if pixelated -- than men, there were still men bothered enormously -- furiously -- and couples who were doubled the fury and hysteria of each other, blaming me. It was my rental. I must be doing this. I must be at fault. That was the idea, see.

You wonder how someone can be raped in cyberspace if you could simply log off at any time, or teleport away or jump off the furniture easily. The answer is because if you are immersed, if you are in an intimate session with an online lover and treating the virtual world as real (and that's ok), you may not be able to respond so quickly; and your investiture in the space means that you don't want to log off because you want to defend your turf and treat the world on its own terms.

A griefer landing in the midst of poseballs was so disgusting -- so wildly offensive the way an intruder would be in real life landing in one's bed -- that people wailed and fought back and tried to get rid of the griefer, and made it worse because he only delighted at having gotten a rise out of them and humiliated them. There were times where I had to teleport to a panicked tenant in one of these furious rape scenes and shout at them over and over to LOG OFF! LOG OFF! like the infamous CSI episode about SL because they couldn't break their gaze -- and their offense. Then I might spend hours trying to remove zillions of penises on physics set to my group -- or even not set, but bouncing endlessly at me from a Linden or neighbour's parcel nearby without autoreturn, sometimes with particles of textures containing pictures of aborted fetuses. A hailstorm of this stuff -- it's hard to take.

I've asked tenants why they can't log off for five minutes just to break the attention span of these goons -- I find that works great -- but they get angry. They feel they are paying rent, paying money, deserve their time online, and won't be budged. They are like settlers on their turf defending their land. They want to take their guns and shoot the rapists; they want me to allow them to install orbiters (devices that send intruders into orbit away from the sim) -- I don't allow these devices or weapons because they only start a cycle of more violence and annoy others in the area who live there and aren't intruding, but just proximate. Like a lot of people, I've learned to adapt to these wishes of people online -- they want security and privacy -- they will fight for it. You can't tell them something inane and stupid like "don't come on the Internet if you don't want people to see your avatar naked" -- they demand the right to ensure the space as they wish. And I actually find nothing wrong with that; indeed, I think it is part of what ensures people retain humanity on line. The geeks respond to this assault on the senses and sensibility by demanding more hardoning of the senses to technical exigencies; but people don't understand why they need to do that. They want the tech to serve them. They are not here to abdicate their humanity just because they are online.

The goons don't retain any humanity online; Lord of the Flies is a day at the beach by comparison. The lengths to which they will go; the dull repetitivesness of the banality of evil coupled with the ingenuity that a virtual world in 3D and interactive real-time can supply -- they're pretty amazing. Some of them will stalk for days, waiting for someone to inadvertently put a TV or a hutch into "share" -- and exploiting the fact that my group is open for the convenience of tenants, join the group, and then seize the "shared" object and leave it all in pieces all over the sim.

Even so, I was determined to live in an open society online. I would not move to an invitation only, group-only, access-controlled sim like a virtual gated suburban community. This was Mainland. I wanted it to be open so that people came to know their neighbours and so their friends could easily visit. There were hundreds of more times a week that ordinary people were grateful for the open group -- no losing rental time while they waited for an invitation; no ugly red lines; no need to find me if they had a friend over who wanted to build something or show something, etc. So the few times a month I had to face these incidents was worth it. I mitigated them. I moved on.

I could write a book about all the ways in which I was griefed -- and worse, my tenants, with whom they had no actual beef and who were innocent people online -- and perhaps someday I will. In their attack against innocent civilians, and not against the actual person they felt they were in combat with (me), they were like terrorists. Der, I get they are only online nuisances, and real terrorists are what left thousands of ceiling tiles floating down the East River, and thousands of pieces of paper and furniture, and morbidly, pieces of flesh, with a strench of burnt flesh and plastic in the air for months later. Again, I don't need any lecturing on the differences between these things, yet they are similar in the springs of their existence, and the patterns and ways in which the springs uncoil in action.

02/16/2011

There's something that doesn't quite sit right with me about this story of HBGary, the private security firm that is now being villified for having hacked the Anonymous movement that supports WikiLeaks, and bragged about their sleuthing skills and ability to deflect hostile attacks on corporate clients such as Bank of America.

Let me first note that human rights activists are very wary of private security firms. We've always questioned them as outsourcers of the government's dirty work in wars. The reason you have scandals like hired security firm employees raping children in Afghanistan is because of this increasing trend and increasing laxness of discipline and civilian oversight. There are more and more of these firms in our day, with less and less scrutiny (and that's the idea). They commit more and more of the acts of war in our name, with less and less of our knowledge, and this is wrong.

If there is a war in cyberspace -- and I believe there is -- then there will be a war on hackers that will involve these private security firms just like the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we will all be the worse for it -- but that doesn't mean we can't forthrightly explain what the original problem is: terrorists in Iraq; the Taliban in Afghanistan; and their moral (if not actual) equivalents in Anonymous on the Internet.

While perhaps government agencies believe it makes them more nimble and possibly even cost-efficient to be contracting out jobs like this, I think ultimately it makes them more weak. They probably end up spending more money in the end and they become complacent and lazy about functions that should be theirs in a democratic society under the rule of law in which they are charged with maintaining law and order and managing wars abroad (unfortunately for the purists, war itself is not illegal, and is under the rule of law, too).

Scrape away the hype and hysteria in the leftist media (Salon, Huffington Post) about the supposed response of the U.S. government to WikiLeaks, and you're actually left with a perplexing picture. Abroad, observers of the U.S. conflate Mike Huckabee calling for the death penalty against Assange with the entire U.S. government and Congress, and don't see him as the outlier he is. Most politicians, if they are saying anything about WikiLeaks -- and they really aren't saying much -- are saying that it doesn't matter, it only makes us look good, "they hate our freedom," etc. They just aren't commenting. Probably a lot of them are unfamiliar with the foreign anarchist culture the group represents and don't know about WikiLeaks faithful friends, like RCA Victrola dogs, the e-thugs of Anonymous. They might be surprised to learn that this is the same group that hacked into and stole Sarah Palin's email and that defaced Sen. John Edwards' campaign site in Second Life. These are not just people who "help Egypt" or "get up to some pranks sometimes" with obscene material. They are an adult, organized, concerted force operating against liberal democracies, and sometimes exploited or even led by foreign intelligence agenices. That they are willing to put a 16-year-old girl out as a front man like the mythological Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya lets us know something about their amorality, not that the kids are alright and "more clever" than adults.

What has the U.S. government actually done about WikiLeaks? Not a lot. First there was a cease-and-desist letter -- fairly mild -- from the State Department's Legal Advisor, Harold Koh, long a champaign of human rights. Then there have been a few fairly mind statements from Attorney General Eric Holder that an investigation is under way. President Obama hasn't been standing at a podium shaking his fist and vowing to hunt these people down. He's said nothing, really. This is all in keeping with a philosophy of the left and of this administration to treat "global terrorism" and politicized Internet crime of this nature not as something exotic, as if the anarchists and terrorists were impressive warriors in a righteous cause of their own, not to have a "war on terrorism," but instead to treat them like common criminals, people who have merely committed a very specific crime, like a petty misdemeanor or a specific felony, and keep the prosecution of them very low-key, so as to avoid glorifying them and helping them feel like martyrs. That's why the leftist coverage of this is so hilarious -- the Obama Administration, the most liberal in history, is not exhibiting the anger and hysteria or even embarrassment attributed to them, once you look for their actual official statements, instead of what you think they said in your imagination.

A strange thing has occurred that also makes no sense to me: leaks have started coming out of the Department of Justice, or there is some implication from DOJ sources, that the U.S. government doesn't have a case against Assange, that they are unable to show a link between Assange of WikiLeaks and Manning. Apparently to make the case, they'd have to show that Manning was commanded by, or instructed by, or colluded with Assange/WikiLeaks personnel in his hacking venture.

It's very odd that the Administration would deliberately weaken their own prosecution case in this manner, before the trial, but it could be a deliberate distraction from what they are really doing, or part of that "low-key" approach, or it could be wishful thinking on the left, and eagerness to find any DOJ source (perhaps one not representative) saying "there's no case" since this is the ardent belief of the WikiLeaks supporters.

It's very strange for all these people to be claiming there is no direct link between Assange and Manning when there are the Wired chat logs. These are constantly impugned by WikiLeaks supporters everywhere, but in fact, I've noted that some Anonymous are quite willing to drop affiliation and support of Assange per se when it suits them.

Wired, if you notice, has covered this story rather more critically than their own hacker culture would seem to dictate. That may be due to several factors -- the inherent hatred and suspicion that one geek bears for another and their willingness to always show them up and break the tribal ranks when necessary; a certain native suspicion of the bullshit that Assange has spread and a growing dislike of all his contradictory claims and his showboating around the world -- he seems to have departed from the cause into an ego trip; the hard-hitting reporting that some people think Wired delivers (I don't, after participating in one of their articles on Anonymous); and their status as a business that still has to sell magazines touting the wonders of Silicon Valley's produce, which means they can't just be a cheerleader for anarchist collectives.

The Guardian is now very critical of Assange and WikiLeaks; so is the Times. A lot of leftist press like Salon and various blogs haven't kept up with this tide -- I give it another 6 weeks, the usual lag between the European leftist media and the U.S. liberal press, even in the Internet age because people are people, and absorb new information and change their impressions only as fast as they can, which isn't instantly.

The Wired chat logs appear to be authentic. Yes, chat logs can be tampered with, and yes, we get it that a former hacker turned state's evidence, Lamo, a guy who has had close relations with Wired, is a source people impugn. Glenn Greenwald, not surprisingly, has kicked up the most hysteria about this but Wired has made a credible defense. But there is still a kind of sacred relict quality to chatlogs that the script kiddies themselves give them and oddly enough, I've found that chat logs are NOT what they redact or change as a rule. They all seem pretty authentic to me, and nobody is seriously challenging the text qua text; BoingBoing.net may complain they are not complete or not in a fair context, but they don't say the actual text is tampered with -- and while they say the rest of the material Wired redacted (because it was about Manning's personal life) doesn't contain mentions of Assange, what Wired did publish does, and BoingBoing doesn't appear to dispute that.

o Manning was indeed in touch with Assange, so Assange's lawyers are now lying if they say he was never in touch

o Manning defensively denies a query from Lamo about whether he takes orders from Assange, indicating that in fact he may well have, or feels he has to defend himself from that charge, or feels he has to justify himself -- and that shows maybe there *was* an instruction or a very strong hint or some collusion between Manning's hacking and Assange.

This information will come out at trial, not in the press before hand, unless of course the government itself is so infiltrated by WikiLeaks and Anonymous that various saboteurs will defeat the DOJ's case ahead of time.

Maybe the FBI doesn't have anything more than that chat log, which isn't "trial truth" and likely not enough by itself to establish the case.

Why are they going after Twitter DMs (they don't have to go after anything but Twitter DMs as the rest is a matter of the public record)? Because they may hope to establish ties between WikiLeaks and Manning or even Anonymous and WikiLeaks (that shouldn't be hard to do, given the way in which Anonymous shock troops harass critics like me if they take on someone like Jacob Appelbaum -- they are all his followers, and once they see him condemn someone, the signal tacitly goes out, and they don't even have to give an instruction in the IRC channel (although we have seen how they do).

The entire HBGary caper strikes me as odd. What basically happened here (as we're told the story) is that Aaron Barr, the computer security specialist of HBGary, decided to go after Anonymous so that he could contract out his services to the Bank of America which is being targeted next by WikiLeaks. So apparently all he did is go in the IRC channel, then track them on other social media like Facebook or Twitter or other platforms where they hang out (I call this "triangulation") -- something any of us who has been following this phenomenon even fairly superficially would know to do. Apparently he didn't hack into their email, but bragged he had found them victory-dancing (they always brag of their exploits, which is how you trap them). This seemed really vainglorious and premature -- in fact so outrageously so, and so stupidly so, and so clumsily so, that I have to wonder if this caper is in fact part of an elaborate sting.

In other words, HBGary's guy goads the hornet's nest, they all fly out in a fury and sting the target, exposing all their tracks in that process, and HBGary pretends to take a fall -- and the other security agencies then close ranks and excommunicate HBGary (whereupon it merely re-emerges under one of its subsidaries or even a new name to live to do the same thing again).

Maybe it's something less conspiratorial -- and it's only about several private security firms in their own intramural battle for prestige and influence with big customers like the USG and BofA -- that would explain it, too.

But you have to look at the net effect of this caper: Anonymous is now proven to have committed crimes -- hacking into data bases, stealing and publishing email and proprietary information, blackmailing and coercing people, etc. Once you take away the leftist indignation at the methods HBGary itself used and the hype around their intentions, you have something else: there is now a very vivid criminal trail of Anonymous bad deeds, some attached to real-life names.

HBGary, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have committed any actual crime. Hey, you free-speechniks and Internet freedom-fighters -- making a PowerPoint about your plans isn't a crime; it's a speech. Having a PowerPoint that talks about "neutralizing" Glenn Greenwald or intimidating WikiLeaks donors or attacking WikiLeaks sites or social-hacking Anonymous -- these might all be moral sins, but they aren't computer fraud crimes yet.

(And yes, hacking, which is a word I'm going to keep for a range of activities whether a social hack, a common DDOS attack, or more sophisticated coding and cracking, because I think you define hacking from the perspective of its victims, not its perpetrators. Hacking is using computers in ways they were not intended to damage people's privacy or business -- full stop. People like Deanna Zandt indignantly hectoring us all that we "can't" use the word "hacking" to describe a DDOS or a social hack using social network or public knowledge rather than actual computer programming (Palin's email) -- that's only part of her overall shtick to whitewash the whole thing and make it seem less damaging -- and also to make non-specialists feel off-balance and stupid. We're not. We get it a lot better than this child of German campus radicalism does about the criminal nature of these movements.)

Meanwhile, Anonymous, bragging even more than Aaron Barr bragged and excited and stimulated (they're all saying "let's do this again!" in the IRC chat rooms because they found it such an incredible rusn) has been outed for what it is: a criminal hacking movement targeting and harming people unlawfully.